Police Chief Wins Raves For Starring Role As Diplomat

August 04, 2000|By Flynn McRoberts, Tribune Staff Writer.

PHILADELPHIA — During the postmortems of how Philadelphia handled its big Republican show this week, one image will endure: Police Commissioner John Timoney, decked out in helmet, short-sleeve shirt and shorts, commanding his troops from the seat of his mountain bike.

Had the thousands of demonstrators who converged on his city re-created the mayhem that cost Seattle's police chief his job after the World Trade Organization meeting, Timoney could have been out too. And Timoney knew it.

"Being a police chief in any major American city is a high-profile, high-energy, high-casualty job," he said in an interview Thursday. "So I was half-kidding when people asked, `Are you leaving?' I said, `Don't worry about it. Come around [Saturday]. I'll probably get fired anyway if this Republican convention blows up in my face.'"

It didn't. Just weeks after a television helicopter broadcast a group of Philadelphia officers beating a suspected carjacker, the city's cops endured taunts and street blockades without lashing out at the demonstrators. Only a few violent clashes occurred.

The relative calm is likely to enhance Timoney's already polished reputation, which two years ago put him on the list of candidates for Chicago police superintendent.

His is not a polished reputation in the traditional sense. Timoney, 52, is the kind of chief who looks far more at ease on his police-issued mountain bike, helping officers make arrests, than in a suit behind a podium.

Just this week, he helped round up a dozen protesters trying to tip over a car.

Stories of Timoney making his own arrests are legion. But bashing heads is not his idea of police work. As the No. 2 cop on New York's force, he struggled to change not just police methods but officers' fundamental priorities--from protecting their partners above all else, to protecting the public.

Timoney seems to be a combination of a tough guy and a softie. While he was a top New York cop, he had himself filmed being spritzed on the face with pepper spray. He wanted to prove to civil libertarians that changing to pepper spray from Mace would not pose a greater risk to suspects.

Just as important, he wanted to convince skeptical officers that pepper spray was an effective crime-fighting tool. "They said, `Wooo, we're going to spray with vegetables!'" the commissioner recalled.

The demonstration worked.

He took it in the mouth, in the eye and in the ear. "And I was down," Timoney said. "And then they filmed me at my desk a half hour later. I looked like I'd been beaten up by Ali or Frazier. But I was OK."

Many of his officers seem to like the guy, largely because he doesn't ask them to do anything he wouldn't do himself--hence, his weeklong bike ride among the protesters.

But there's something for police skeptics to like as well. Timoney, who has been a police officer for three decades, doesn't trust cops.

"When I say I don't trust cops--I don't trust authority. Now that may be coming back from my Irish background. I have no idea," said the man who grew up in The Liberties, the oldest neighborhood of Dublin, before coming to America with his family at the age of 13.

So he's "completely against" such things as surveillance cameras in public and central files on suspects. "It just kind of rubs me the wrong way," he said.

A little more background: An athlete who sculls on the city's Schuylkill River at 5:30 a.m. each day, Timoney also has completed 14 marathons--twice doing two marathons in a single week.

Four years ago, he left the NYPD, the department he had served since 1967, after New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's well-publicized tiff with Police Commissioner William Bratton over who got credit for cutting crime in the city.

Timoney was Bratton's guy and Timoney left with him.

Many New York cops still miss him. Officer David Yarnell, a Philadelphia police spokesman, said he always tells them the same thing: "Too bad. We got him. You lost him. Talk to your mayor."

After leaving the NYPD, Timoney became a police consultant, helping to refashion the police forces in his native Ireland and, more recently, in Northern Ireland--work that continues today.

In March 1998, then-Mayor Ed Rendell appointed him to run Philadelphia's 6,800-officer police force.

There have been difficult times, most recently the controversy over the beating of the carjacking suspect, 50-year-old Thomas Jones.

But even the department's critics said the police force has helped some forget about that episode with the handling of this week's challenge: Controlling a flurry of sometimes violent street blockades and protest marches with few clashes and little more than traffic tie-ups.

Not surprisingly, the performance got raves from Timoney's boss, Mayor John F. Street. But even the protesters' top lawyer agreed.

Stefan Presser, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union's local chapter, said this of Timoney: "He's spectacular. Just look at the city."